Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1966, Tamasa Distribution
Comment
The sequence begins with three static shots that seem to outline a scenario with a classic narrative: a building site, a man in front of a garage, a red car that arrives in a rush. Juliette, a young woman, accompanied by a friend, visits her husband who works there. From the outset, JL Godard abandons any naturalistic work which would normally describe the stages of this visit shot by shot, delineating the sensations and emotions that animate the characters.
In this sequence, he constructs a puzzle of dominant sensations whose focus is uncertain and which follows one another, weaving in and out of each other, vaguely evoking the relationship of the inhabitants of a Parisian suburb in the 1960s to the world, at the time when the large housing estates that transformed the landscape were being constructed. The shots are very definite: they isolate objects and details of the setting in which the men are filmed on an equal footing with the objects that surround them. The shots respond to each other and echo each other in a game of exquisite corpse full of the element of chance. The director seems to play by transforming the garage into a studio in which he constructs and catches colours, snatches of sentences, words and things "without quality" - the bodies of cars, bits of signs, advertising boards; mixed with slow dolly shots of the foliage or the sky. It is impossible to say in which time frame the sequence takes place. The rhythm is out of sync and is built up in the editing process by the recurrence of certain shots or motifs (the arrival of the red car, a character waiting or smoking).
The soundtrack reinforces and accompanies the cubist construction of this sequence, which begins with a whisper: a murmur that seems to be the director's own internal voice addressing the viewer, brutally covered over by the interruption of real sound, the roar of the engine and the machines, that saturates the soundtrack. On several occasions the sound is cut off, leaving moments of pure silence. The sound of the petrol station meter’s scrolling numbers is noticeably amplified. This singular collage of images, sounds and moments disrupts the narrative regime to which the viewer is accustomed. It provokes a strange distortion, a plunge into the diffuse sensations that affect the various characters seen on screen, caught up in their everyday, urban world. The director's voice-over whispering also seems to invite the viewer into an intimate personal introspection on his own presence in the world and in the film.
Comment
The sequence begins with three static shots that seem to outline a scenario with a classic narrative: a building site, a man in front of a garage, a red car that arrives in a rush. Juliette, a young woman, accompanied by a friend, visits her husband who works there. From the outset, JL Godard abandons any naturalistic work which would normally describe the stages of this visit shot by shot, delineating the sensations and emotions that animate the characters.
In this sequence, he constructs a puzzle of dominant sensations whose focus is uncertain and which follows one another, weaving in and out of each other, vaguely evoking the relationship of the inhabitants of a Parisian suburb in the 1960s to the world, at the time when the large housing estates that transformed the landscape were being constructed. The shots are very definite: they isolate objects and details of the setting in which the men are filmed on an equal footing with the objects that surround them. The shots respond to each other and echo each other in a game of exquisite corpse full of the element of chance. The director seems to play by transforming the garage into a studio in which he constructs and catches colours, snatches of sentences, words and things "without quality" - the bodies of cars, bits of signs, advertising boards; mixed with slow dolly shots of the foliage or the sky. It is impossible to say in which time frame the sequence takes place. The rhythm is out of sync and is built up in the editing process by the recurrence of certain shots or motifs (the arrival of the red car, a character waiting or smoking).
The soundtrack reinforces and accompanies the cubist construction of this sequence, which begins with a whisper: a murmur that seems to be the director's own internal voice addressing the viewer, brutally covered over by the interruption of real sound, the roar of the engine and the machines, that saturates the soundtrack. On several occasions the sound is cut off, leaving moments of pure silence. The sound of the petrol station meter’s scrolling numbers is noticeably amplified. This singular collage of images, sounds and moments disrupts the narrative regime to which the viewer is accustomed. It provokes a strange distortion, a plunge into the diffuse sensations that affect the various characters seen on screen, caught up in their everyday, urban world. The director's voice-over whispering also seems to invite the viewer into an intimate personal introspection on his own presence in the world and in the film.